In February 1982, the black American feminist, poet and civil rights activist Audre Lorde said: “If I didn’t define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people’s fantasies for me and eaten alive.” She was ruminating on liberation, oppression and life in the 1960s, but her journey of self-definition and discovery is one many black women in the west find themselves on.
Afua Hirsch is one of them. After her 40th birthday, the journalist and former barrister embarked on “a year of adornment” – a new phase in her life, an attempt to unlock something deeper, something spiritual, to combat the years of debating for her own humanity as a black woman in the public eye. To truly find rest.
She reconnects with her heritage while simultaneously applying this new understanding to her own body. “I’m coming to terms with the fact that, in my family, ancestral traditions of bodily adornment – like so much other knowledge – are lost,” she writes.
If her first book Brit(ish) was about grappling with her identity as a black British woman of mixed heritage, Decolonising My Body aims to unpack how her identity and wider society have shaped her physically. Hirsch is less concerned with proving that she belongs, instead focusing on what she describes as “ancestral deficiency syndrome” – a yearning to restore ancestral traditions “that offer a cohesive way to initiate us through the stages of life”. This isn’t a guide or a self-help book, rather an effort to examine the effects of Eurocentric beauty standards and ask how we can extract ourselves from them.
For example, Hirsch describes how growing up in Britain in the late 90s and 00s, when thinness and disordered eating were worshipped, left its mark. Celebrities who dared show signs of cellulite were deemed “fat” and splashed across gossip magazines. In contrast, in her mother’s home country of Ghana where, as she puts it, “fat is nature’s necklace”, rolls and curves are revered. She confronts the confusing reality of existing between cultures and how it can warp your understanding of your own body.
In doing so, she demonstrates that very little about our bodies exists in a vacuum. The ways in which our physical attributes are worshipped or scrutinised is shaped by our society and our ancestry – whether we like it or not.
Hirsch has a nifty way of drawing from anecdote while using her journalistic skills to report on the wider cultural context, and tracing this back around to her own life. From observing a sacred menstrual ritual with her daughter to the historical significance of tattoos and scarification, she writes in a manner that is self-aware without feeling deprecating or patronising.
This book stands alongside similar work focusing on the body as a site of resilience. The writing of Tricia Hersey, author of Rest Is Resistance, comes to mind. Hersey’s philosophy for black liberation sees rest as a tool to push back against the weight of white supremacy, proclaiming: “You are worthy of care.” In many ways, Decolonising My Body is Hirsch’s pilgrimage towards another definition of rest and care, one that feels ancestral and intimate. As a reader you can’t help but be swept up in her quest of gentle unlearning and relearning.
• Decolonising My Body: A Radical Exploration of Rituals and Beauty by Afua Hirsch is published by Square Peg (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
